BRAVE NEW TENSE

[available as paperback and e--book from Chipmunka]

ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR FROM CHIPMUNKA

Soundcloud Rain

The Sunset Child

Breath Trapped In Heaven

INTRODUCTION

“Drugs are bad,” said the guys at school, or some of them, and I have realised they are right. “Drugs ruin lives,” as my dad used to say. “Drug-taking is monumentally selfish,” also. “Acid is a personality-altering substance,” he used to say too. I found out the hard way and would like to re-iterate those points. I know, a doctor, a progressive, left-wing doctor will say “you are made of drugs,” and Derrida likewise would say to call all drugs “drugs” represents “a dangerous narcotisation of the truth.” I mean of course illegal drugs. Acid can induce a 24 hour nightmare, and as dad said change your personality. Even GM skunk is not to be trusted these days. It has the naturally occurring anti-psychotic ingredient of hash removed and the THC cranked up in extremis. Your brain actually releases cannabinoids naturally for moments of signification, like reaching the top of a mnt, so to flood your brain un-naturally, meaning and signification become aleatory, a mess. There is suddenly “meaning” at every point of intersection in the crazy palimpsest of memory.

Speed meanwhile is the worst drug for the brain, playing havoc with the mood. Heroin is a death sentence. Cocaine is a brief titillation but highly addictive and expensive too, leaving you wishing at the gates of dawn for more while the song that goes “what’s that coming over the hill is it a monster?” is playing. Ecstasy depletes your serotonin supply, leaves you more numb to love than ever before. Even mushrooms are dangerous and with my mental illness I wouldn’t take them again. Then you’ve got so-called safe and legal chemicals like 4CMC that can turn you into a zombie. Pollen meanwhile used to be a kind of “sop,” like a currency in a microcosmic world, but it just induces tangential-mindedness, casuistry, demotivation and is non-conducive to hard, academic concentration. It’s why I fell in love with a different ideal for my poetry herein: but don’t wish to give the game away before you’ve read it. I would like there to be at least some delight in a wilful opacity before it is revealed what is going on.

I like my Chipmunka books to be in some ways the building blocks of a happier world. Soundcloud Rain was a book of songs – that falsified the Nirvana barcode in music and let everyone be involved to some extent. The Sunset Child proved the net existed in the imagination of a child before Berners-Lee invented it. Breath Trapped In Heaven let all else apart from love poetry fall away in the hope that literature has started to release serotonin. (There was also a trail of self-publications from before hand too). Now this: Brave New Tense.

I should impart that I got the ideal from my mother. She texted some poems to me when I was in mental hospital and it took me a while to notice but I realised in the end what she was doing. Mine are not as good, not as quiet, and some are my brother’s and mother’s within.

STILL BEGIN

“Where does it even start?” she asks – but who?

Someone who wishes not to be named, soooooo

let’s just say a graceful and kind lady who now needs

help with threading her thread through the eye

of the needle. “Hello?” she says, failing

so I take over, because I have a strong eye

and a steady hand and find the first needle’s eye

is broken – even when the thread is through.

So we find another needle – she does – rummaging

around in her sewing box to find one - and

we use a device meant for the blind to help

thread the thread through the eye so she -

not I thankfully – can darn the new hole

in her black pants ready for work tomorrow -

beside a glowing fire – with Masterchef on -

while my guitar gently stays upright in

the corner. Then I leave to write when it’s

the right time but hear something drop -

so go back in wearing a presentable face

to ask what it was – O, only her phone - and

she’s got the remote control for the Smart-telly

open - and is massaging the batteries – and the

sound is on mute and she can’t get it back on -

so I take the remote and before I’ve pressed

anything – the sound returns – her program.

THE SHOWER IS LEAKING

The shower is leaking down from above.

Fat, planetary drops drip from a crack

in the kitchen ceiling, and land with a splat

on the plastic packet of plum tomatoes below…

the intervals between them are random.

You could say the ceiling is crying.

I’d cry more like the shower itself,

whose sound is like a ferry’s engine,

should you die. On a happier note -

imagine a single droplet of water

accentuated into a voice, and then

imagine getting into a power shower

where every droplet of water pumped

is like that. Now the shower stops

but the drops still drip down below,

on the plastic packet of plum tomatoes.

Splat. Sometimes sadness is so deep,

the act of crying is a physiological effort;

but now in this moment I feel alright;

and now the drip from the ceiling stops.

HOW TO CAPTURE A UNICORN

Unicorns don’t have go-faster-stripes or gears,

they simply put their front foot forwards

and stride in the silver forests of Holy Night.

Fantastic as their reputation is, still

there is said to have been a type of unicorn

in Ancient China, hunted for the five

colours on its flank. Is this how he runs -

front foot forwards, the rest trailing,

making do with broken ground? The

blind white light of the flash of a Kodak

happy snap camera in the background

might capture something of him but

to conjure would seem more my metier.

An aperture is open on rapture. He stops

at water, dips his head and drinks, drinks

of his own reflected face in the surface.

It is too late to turn back: he must keep going.

Time shrinks to the smallest unit of space

and is gone. The present tense left for him

is wide. It is as wide as a cathedral, or

a game, or even the sea. He runs on,

or off, or away, as the case may be.

Even though he has gone I clearly hear

the electricity bills of the unicorn’s eyes

are exorbitant as planets swirling in orbit.

A PARTING KISS

I felt a leaf, I fell out of life,

probably no-one else knew,

but then there may be some,

who followed my fall,

to the foot of the fell,

where the sum of all

difference is connected,

and the powers that be

could still be clouds, who wear

ripped, blue genes adorned with

peace, love and anarchy

signs, DM boots on their

red-brick road as they pass,

sometimes a creature,

sometimes a form, while

Hamlet below looks up

from the grass and sees

what he wants, and drifts

into daydreams away, and

smiles, and muses, upon

the fragrant beauty of his

cosmic bride, so full of

hope, so full of willingness,

willingness to please,

as the ego-loss breeze

gently rocks the trees and

nothing really matters.

LIGHTS OFF

For soooooooo long I slept with the light on -

a habit I got from living with a woman

who always did – but last night...

last night I lay in rich, fecund, loamy

darkness, listening to voices galore,

trying to ignore the pain of the broken tooth.

It struck me as the way forwards again.

That we are meant to sleep with the lights down.

That waiting in darkness is a good thing.

Darkness can be soul-nourishing, like

uncertainty, to end on a note of radical

incertitude. Darkness can be your friend.

It turns into Technicolour shoals, with-holding

bright things, cures for the common

cold or the curse I was never placed under.

Quite what my dreams were about I

do not remember, but they weren’t bad.

I slept right through until the Night.

So I show a willingness to let go of my ex

whom it seems must’ve feared a burglar.

Now the lecky bills won’t be so high.

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH A LIGHTBULB

Over my head is the electric light.

It is bright and my pale skin might

react to it like a new species.

That I cannot say, not quite.

I can say the light is bright and

reminds me of hugging Flora in a corridor.

That was a long time ago now.

Even the electric light which is hardly

a new invention is over my

head in that other sense

of the word so I am not

that clever, only alive, alright?

If I were that clever I would be

rich and with someone too but

I am not – I got dealt a bad hand.

Still it is good to strive for the light.

Man will always strive for the light.

Myself, I feel like crying tonight -

as if it is all over for me, by dictate.

Let it not be said I am still in revolt.

Let it be said I was bright but

not that bright, only enough

to perform certain tasks like

falsifying the Nirvana barcode right.

I am not even the brightest button

in my own family, under this Night,

let alone the street, though there is

no street, only the loneliness of this

place where all connections meet.

I have resolved to wait, for I think

waiting in darkness is good, nourishing

for the soul, for whom darkness -

well I said it already – becomes

a Technicolour shoal. I have two feet.

One is hurt and one is not, here

at the oldest fell’s foot, but

I don’t know if I am staying put,

nor for what it is I wait, only that

above me is an electric light.

Shine on you crazy lightbulb.

Let me not get into too much debt.

Let water be wet and souls not forget.

Let war be over and let candles be lit.

Let this brief fling with the

politics of flight that keeps me up

all through the night, be true and quite,

and let the ending line be alright.

Let the colour white be white.

Let love live and let it be a sight.

Let me keep my feelers out

for the result of my little bet.

Let me not fall in a hole created by ket

or become machinist on pernicious phet.

Let me quote my old friend Paul

on the words “stet for yet”

and let all books be a set.

Let me not live in too much regret.

Let me celebrate, let us celebrate

the occasional overhead RAF jet,

splitting the sky with a screech as it

gets to where it wants to be, even if

it only be taking the dog to the vet.

Let it not be said all this is too late,

for fate, that we can no longer get

what might await beyond the gate,

and let us all have a tete-a-tete.

I strike the balance of God into it.

I feel out the morsel or bit, right

here in the Age of the Soundbyte,

underneath the Ancient night,

exposed like a wire to its threat,

also an aperture open to delight.

Let this Night be bright, gone

way past midnight towards that light

of dawn that makes us stay and fight.

Let me no longer get high as a kite.

Let death not claim me, not yet,

and let me stand up for my right

to sing the song of the self and soul,

to swallow whole another huge bite.

Some observations are quite trite,

but that she is beautiful is not,

because the beauty itself plays it out,

and maybe, maybe now I shall quit.

Well, maybe I don’t even need to do that.

The ghost of God gave me a fright.

My pathetic excuses are shite,

but my music is increasingly not.

A lot can be said, can be said about

not learning by rote but learning by heart.

I let my attention span flit

like Peter Pan as I nervously sit

and revisit the spot where I got hurt.

Or rather I don’t, and ignore it.

Concentration seems to be shot.

On the landscape I am a blot.

I’ve got to stop before I run out

of places to go, so give me a shout

if ever you want to meet quite discretely

and seal the deal, the contract, neatly,

and feel so real, and squeal completely,

like a pig put into a boiling pot.

Then we get it’s not what I thought,

not what I initially seemed to have bought

but something else hard to abort,

something I’m trying not to blurt out,

put out, the flame of the candle upright,

and a dream that would be a treat,

to pet and name you, to go on a date,

to eat spaghetti from a single plate,

to prize apart the pitiful point,

that love is not dead in my heart.

So for another I seem to wait,

if that is it, unless it is not,

but what we have got, we have got

to get straight, so I say give it away now.

The plot is a vegetable plot with a plight,

but do not forget about the digital dot

whom it would seem is head over heels

with Banchelaw the lion tonight.

Barnes was very good at sport.

Sometimes I could drink a crate.

The on off switch is the clit.

I think it needs switching now.

VIOLET TOUGH

Violet Tough I love you.

I want your body close to mine.

You are the most beautiful

woman I have ever seen.

I had a dream of having sex

with you whilst reading liquid

computers to whom you

seemed to be able to save

all that oneiric-textured

dreamwriting but who

upon my waking had crashed.

Not to matter – I still dream

on. I dream of seeing you trotting

on a horse in the village, as

I make my way back from

the beach with the dog -

and of getting home, getting

spruced up and legging it to the

pub – and finding you there

waiting for me – in my favourite

corner. You would look a stunner.

You’d be the eventual end

of things, like notes tumbling

from a speaker to form a song -

but still I must forget you,

move on, not wend my way.

GRAZING ON A HOTDOG

I graze on a hotdog, knowing

that if we knew what went in

to a hot dog, if we could see

the factory floor level we

wouldn’t eat them at all.

The weather seems okay,

though it is night, and if

I went outside to count

I might note that one star

leads to another star, but

I won’t. An escapist tendency

has me stay up sometimes,

in bad, vampiric, anti-social

Gap Year rhythm. The hot dog

has gone – it is consumed.

Sometimes I look into myself

as in to a deep well, looking

for water, and draw up what

I can, but sometimes it’s nothing.

Sometimes it’s all about what

you and your search-engines

find, not what you make.

I hope that staying here,

staying put in one place,

staring does not grow fur.

A DELIVERY OF WOOD

Today some men came with a van

to deliver the chainsawed logs

of an ash from a lay-by up

in Whitbeck. They reversed

into the drive, then the back end

of the truck lifted and tipped

the logs onto the drive. Now

the logs need to be stored away

in the wood-hole so they can

start drying; but first they

need chainsawing into smaller

pieces. For at the moment they

are too big. Then we’ll have

enough wood for the whole winter.

It’s pleasing to see because we

like to keep the fire going.

We’ll have to get on with the

chopping because we don’t want

them to get too dry. Chainsawing

logs is easier when they’re fresh.

If they are under a certain size

we can just split them with an axe.

We have a new axe. Its handle

is made of rubber. The old one

was made of wood and broke.

AN ENCHANTING ECHO

I keep hearing this sound rebound around -

like someone playing guitar with a police siren -

which could be my friend across the water -

and is like a Point of Departure from Walden -

an igloo-blue note sequence, ascending

and descending like stairs, digitised,

made of compressed waves, outside our paradigm.

Its lilting, blue lament reminds me how

Western sheet music only goes left to right

and there might be something more holistic

through whom we penetrate the is-ness of life.

That would apply Bakhtin to Bach.

It would be the same to see invisible sheet

music stream from right to left in a rural scene.

It might be what Syd Barrett meant when

he said he wanted to hair not just hear.

Once I heard a whole stereo of sound, flying

outside my old Millom flat’s window,

no technology around nor ego, but

that was then and this is now. By now

I press my ear more to the quiet like

to a pillow to hear the sounds of the isle,

to hear the silence divulging its whisper.

Even if it be distant, the song is still heard.

It might be what Jim Morrison meant

when he said to translate the barking

of ancient dogs, whom it seems I used to

mimic in my backyard pram in Hackney.

A PAUSE FOR THOUGHT

The shower has been going like a lawnmower

mowing and mowing for what seems like

half an hour without so much as one drop, dripping

down from the crack in the kitchen ceiling.

It stops, an event that coincides with all

simultaneity happening and happening, which

gives pause for thought, reflection, like an

inveigling lull. If it makes sense to live

in the present tense I sit in the kitchen, where

once I cooked the tape, the tape whose pause

where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel

was healed and fused. By now the gadgets

at first hand are not mine own invention, are a laptop

and Vape pen – but I think of that pause, that

abeyance in that song where the reel was cut

and resealed and how the pause was done

away with. Peace settles around me like hands

clasped in prayer. The tone of the drone of

the fridge changes gear, my reporting of which

shows how little is happening, yet all that

silent store of energy all round me too. Gravid

seems this interlude that stretches like insipid

gum in the back of a car on a Saturday afternoon.

That triumph of magical thinking over logic,

it soon became a nacreous, plastic stench

when the evidence was melted in the AGA -

now nobody can listen to the tape to verify

that my senses were correct! I photo’d the eventual

objet d’art, Strange Attractor, utilitarian Martianist

wedding ring, dream-meet connector, and put

it online, meaning the thing has been through

more or less every stage of process, genre

that exists. By then I felt the melted tape had

become the empty carcass of a metaphysical idea,

so gave it away, to an ex gf who probably discarded

it. This pause here in this moment, it too could

be done away with, is going, is passing, is

like a digital wink. It’s why I cherish it, as

I write as if it were a dying flower. The chimney

whispers of ghosts in a long gone tongue, the country dark

outside the window remains a silent wall, the tick

tock of the clock plods on like a caravan

of camels crossing the real live wilderness…

a car zooms past on the valley road, its headlights

probing the darkness. On the wall hangs a

calendar, a Notice Board, some of my sister’s

art, and a chart listing the names of the plants

of the Meadows, but they are indomitable.

Into them I cannot “escape,” so remain, sipping

tea in my quiet moment. How the pause was

done away with is hard to say, but possibly

rhythm. I have songs about it, and an a

half-baked equation to summarise the change.

The fridge has another gear-shift of braincells -

all of a sudden nothing happened worth reporting -

at the bottom of it all my tea has gone cold.

NOTE ON HYPER-VISION AT THE FOOT OF SEA NESS

Sea Ness, the foothill of Black Combe

in whom there were tunnels lined with

free beer dispensers, fruit machines and

torches when I was but a young lad,

used to be called Seer Ness, allegedly,

after a seer and his trance. I am

the one that used to be the seer.

My journey has been long and strange.

These days I focus more on the mind’s

ear than on the visual end of the spectrum,

but about the culmination of every

sense of the word ‘vision’ I’d say:

the poet extirpates every trace of recognition

from the mind, unlooses the mind of

form, method-acts every adjective

in Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and

still attains visual radio, broadcasting

dreams, dreams that billow like a

weeping willow in the wind, swirling

in purple, digital swathes about

the head of the deranged visionary.

Now to the boring smell of water

everything has returned, to sobriety,

to the status life detail and minutiae

of the daily soap opera of the goldfish

bowl – and to that present tense I must

surrender, not like a rented thing to

death but like snow falling to a petticoat

earth – to a brave new tense that is

rinsed by fire, by plangent, flagrant

and lambent flame inside whom

life is clean and life is green again.

BLACK COMBE

Black Combe is the oldest of all our fells,

smooth and glaciated by years of striation,

rounded and maternal like a bosom,

dipping in the middle like dad’s

baggy, brown hammock from Afghanistan,

seeming like a great, slumbering diplodocus

when you drive towards it from town,

or like Buddha levitating when you’re here.

The newer spikier fells are upstart punks

but Black Combe is like a mother,

reason the qwerty keyboard ends on M,

mutable, still, on a long enough timeline,

playground for children full of free-range running

and bracken I. D. cards, evidence, maybe

Nature is a great art exhibition, or

even the true ramification of Kate.

At the top you can find a cairn, and shelter

from vicious rips and whips of wind,

sometimes see a view of four kingdoms,

up the coast to Sellafield, unless

it is misty as so often it seems to be;

and then jog down with a tilted rhythm,

sideways so as to not fall over, trying

your best to remain strong footed in the scree.

A LITTLE SHOPPING LIST

Onions

Frankfurters

Bananas

Bacon -

is that the simplicity

the other side of complexity?

Do I stare like the man

at the end of the movie Pi

endlessly inveigled

by a Natural scene?

Crisps

Chocolate mousse

Milk

Tea

I feel like crying

for how rude I have been -

for hurting loved ones

with cutting words

when I lost my mind

and was srsly ill.

Ham

Lurpak

Biscuits

Canderel

The list is supposed to be

written on a post-it note

but I’m ever prey

to jotto-mania, ever since

a giant wind picked

up my hand and

started me writing

when I was five and we were

on holiday in France.

What of the loved ones hurt?

It’s a sobering and heart-breaking thought,

that once an intelligent creature

cannot cope it never copes again;

that once a trust is broken

it can’t be reforged.

Love

Love

that’s what my list needs -

but as Lennon sang

money can’t buy it.

There should be

more love in the world.

Sausages.

FOR THE POLICE

I was the guy that had the idea

to invent the binaural earphones.

My evil friend meanwhile, Sauron

has inherited all the money he’ll need

and will never work a day in his life.

There are those that consider him

to be part of the social problem!

When I went down south to stay with P,

to look for work, it was Sauron

who popped up with the earphones.

We formed a band, and recorded.

When I wanted to be out of there,

because I wished to become an

English teacher, he wouldn’t allow it.

He perpetuated the scene, a wrong-

headed scene, his experiment

into recording on binaural earphones.

He later said it was a trap to catch

an evil cunt, which we don’t think is me.

For all I came out looking like a blur unto the doctor

and there are those that think he

should go to prison for what he did.

Now I can’t even go to the pub,

for fear of being perceived by my fellow

man, so can’t get drunk with the farmers.

To be fair it was a truly horrid time

when the Towers came down

which I had foreseen using my brain,

but my friend insisted, with all his money

my life still had to go to waste.

LOST MINIATURE DREAMS

This text is painstakingly transcribed from defaced bank notes. Some of the bank notes are damaged, illegible, others ‘missing.’ Efforts have been made to order the bank notes but were not always successful. No efforts were made to authorial-fingerprint the voice or psychoanalyse the handwriting. The text is not necessarily a critical indictment of embedded liberal capitalism of whom we are liberal, human subjects and where money, formerly neutral means of exchange, is becoming a flying, white, electrical spark passing through borders of osmotic porosity in the dark. Nor is the text necessarily about an imaginary designer drug called Strictly Free that does exactly what it says on the tin, is and makes you “strictly free” to consume. It is but an open-air poem, comprised of torn and bleeding snapshot-fragments that are given artificial insemination. Inherent in it is a notion that money is an Ode to Death, that a fiver is cheese and onion flavour, that work sets you free.

Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.

Necklace noose,

reckless truce,

drooling before

wet, electric eyes

My name is David Bonky,

I’m a knock-kneed hummingbird,

there’s a tear up my jacket.

(1998)

I’m the only one left,

left to shoot my own gun,

this is the dead land,

crack a smile and curse the sun.

There is joy in things

and smiles not grins like butter

but like butterflies.

Waves

[squiggle]

crossed the FTSE

[squiggle]

and the Helter-Skelter

[squiggle]

crashed in the electric-sea…

Blessed may be the end at last,

under the sea,

below the soul,

in the upside-down

Oceans above us

(all that heaven sends is rain.)

Down

down

down

down

down

deep

blue

below

“eh, up

mate,”

says my

mate

and is

it safe

to say

hello?

To plug my senses in the mains

might engage !00% of my brains,

but it’s gone wrong at the plug,

just a dream on a drug.

I felt a leaf,

I fell out of life,

probably no-one else knew.

A trance of stalks walks on stilts

like a stance on talks only to the toilet

then back to bed to rest its head

under the soft, Pink Panther blanket.

She blows a poisonous magic

searched the corridor for a

crash had no survivors in Soviet

be weed

Il faut que je m’en aille.

Sometimes you’ve just

got to hit the road and

Colour circles red. How many circles?

Colour triangles blue. How many squares?

Colour oblongs orange. How many triangles?

Leaves that played on the surface of the water,

these are the leaves they have in Heaven,

these are the leaves of love.

Signed by everwell,

she couldn’t hit it sideways

or maybe a soothsaying Spiderman

with the hairgel of Dracula,

Atlantis, Aquarius, the 60’s.

“Is there anything I can do to help?

Looks like I’m on washing up duty.

It’s fine I don’t mind washing up.

It won’t take long then I’ll be free.”

£34. 84 at the Take-away joint

can get you quite bloated,

not just quench’d and sated;

and by now I sit here wondering

just how much it cost.

My fingers have crashed,

my fingers have crashed

and my mad, crashed

fingers have connected.

A thesis as thin as the Rizla it’s in

can lead all the way to the loony bin,

can make you forget how to spell

Winnie the Pooh at the gates of Hell.

The day is a dream’s balcony around mellow me.

I remember when banks let pens go free.

Art gets to its feet like a cartoon Bambi.

Love has gone veggie for reasons of Disney!

The future is no longer what it used to be!

I still crave a greedy DogMuckels when

the plush seat gets a hard-on at the end.

When Paul was talking of “McTruth”

I noticed a swarm of flies in the house.

Nobody else could even see them but me.

My mother calls the pills I pop “poetry

buttons” in motley conglomerations

like pool balls or songcells and

their names should not appear in poems.

Caroline is the last yellow crayon.

This could be the door to telepathy.

My granny and grand-dad were in the R. A. F.

Under a blanket in the back of a car -

I think of it now I’ve got this far.

Alone in the solipsistic kitchen

whom it would seem is un-war-ful.

Walking slowly down to the Irish Sea

to see if my place in life is lowly

a dying animal goes much faster.

In the picture of the airport

I can see… a runway,

two planes, a cloud,

a control tower

and the ire ii net.

Hot July brings cooling showers,

straw berries and gilly flowers,

we’ll gather over endless hours.

miles away from paper powers.

He found himself on a plane.

He found himself on a.

He found himself on.

He found himself.

He found.

P.

If dog = pi times MC squared

it is because you wish to think him round

while O is the key of water shared

when rolling round on the ground.

O for a Muse of fire that descends

from the brightest Heaven of invention;

Rintrah roars and shakes his icy fires

into the burdened air, breathing.

One night, Jim Morrison pointed up

at the night sky on LSD and said “look!

It’s the infinite cocks fucking the infinite cunts!”

Barnes’s goal against Brazil,

it was was not born under a hill,

it is the best goal I’ve seen still,

Barnes’s goal against Brazil.

If the windows were washed – every one -

we’d see nothing through them ‘cept

the white mirrors reaffirming the quiet

interior of this solipsistic kitchen of fiction.

Bart Simpson’s yellow zigzag hair apostrophe d

@ Van Goghian black border sun

heard James Joyce would just use |||| 4

ROYGBIV in Fibonacci sequence barcode smile

“I’ve been writing about bifters.

Hello my name is Pirripa.

[sound of sucking in of smoke.)

That’s my boyfriend.”

Now we are gathered to appoint the Gods,

now we are gathered to consecrate ourselves,

now we are gathered to ordain this dust,

we are gathered to live and to dream.

If you believe it, it is there,

naked under nearer stars,

softly swashing, backwashing music,

music in a room with no door.

A

A Yellow

A Yellow Pages

May dawn behead me

A Yellow Pages will suffice

A Yellow Pages will

Farewell my life

A Yellow

A

I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too,

NHS for Lucy in the Soul w/ Demons,

H20 for hypothalamus tattoo,

ESA for extra sensory allowance

but I for one still don’t really know

if Lucy even happens to be an actual substance.

I remember happy, sunny days,

days when we scored some weed and went

out in the meadows, when Paul

would turn to me and say

“wear an emotional condom

before you fuck my mind, man.”

Wouldn’t it be pollen

if Barnes has scored a chicken

and spring is a red horse?

Enough is the hope the heart

literally needs in order for it to survive

without which it can stop, meaning

Duff, which is H suspended in deafness

I cannot tell if sipping sugarless tea

or stretching honesty is the more easy

an encryption for the future that

ain’t what it used to be but I still

await the future with rapt uncertainty

and cannot stand the suspense.

We are the velvet e’s,

we’re shitting in Cuntington’s letterbox,

the Roman Rd below,

beneath us as we fly.

[enter bass organ of ‘The End’]

Butter is good when you’re a nutter,

but I can think of something that’s better,

so had better write her a letter.

Opened unto the gloom under

sliver moon I slide her over.

Semen spills like silver water.

We’re soon enough in the flotsam ether.

Forlorn as fallen autumn leaves,

is the wave that misbehaves,

goes out taking E at raves,

and soon enough no more believes.

One thing I learned I shouldn’t say too soon,

underneath this new moon,

but might instead just impart,

it is because I have a heart.

What actually happened was, I ended up robbing a bank, with a banana smuggled under a tea cloth and a balaclava on my head and face…there was a get-away car outside, and we went far and to a separate country too. We started to loan the money out and thus made money off it which meant we had plenty with which to use for a blank canvas. We had to be concise, when writing our contract on the money. The police were onto us, so what we did was wait until we had disseminated our message, and earned more money off the loaning of it than we stole in the first place, and quietly stormed into the bank with a banana openly protruding from a balaclava in my hand, and h-a-n-d-e-d the money – and the extra too – back to the bank. The police then let us off the crime and we went home, knowing our nodes were encrypted.

Of all the work I had achieved, be it before or after my mental illness, I still think of the binaural earphone album and the defaced bank note text as being among the best. I think if you remain on the left it’s alright but only when it’s phoney, for defacing actual bank notes is against the law. I think if you have to read Homer in order to be a philosopher everyone should get that opportunity should they choose and probably for free too. I think that is my philosophy and even more so, yours.

KURT ON QWERTY

Here I am ( ) only typing

with my left hand, like Kurt Cobain, upturning

his guitar. Or turning it the other way

round. Returning to life I am, while

the earth spins on its tilted axis

round the tired sun. Returning

to solid ground. I nearly expended us

and our little dreamwriting teamwriting

tete a tete. But I did not and am

glad for that. To be quite frank and

to turn your attention back round

to that gallant fact – of only using

my left hand – nothing that great or deep

or creative is coming to me yet and it just seems

like a way of slowing down the jotto

mania of the myriad mind, the

monkey mind. I am inconvenienced but

still spilling quicksilver at a rate of knots.

I am right handed but wish I was not.

Could you imagine a future where

the norm is reversed? Where it is proven

the left handed are cleverer and therefore

people are encouraged, even those

born right handed to go the other way?

Da Vinci, Einstein, Hendrix and more -

I love them and their aesthetic sensibilities;

my mother, brother and sister are

the same. So is the woman who said

sorry is just a game. And the friend

that opined a suicide attempt would

be the biggest cop out ever. They

refresh the demotic with intrinsic meaning

instead of trivialising the deep. It might

be why I don’t even want what’s mine.

WHILE I MAKE TEA

A parcel brought by a van belongs to someone.

It is an oblong shape, a small, cardboard box.

It is a battery for a chainsaw.

The person it belongs to hasn’t got

any chain oil for the chainsaw so

bought a second battery online

in order to charge it while the other

is being used, so short is its battery span.

I shall take the parcel to the person.

Or else I shall not on second thoughts

because the contents live in the present room.

Which means I can drink my tea.

Further boxes are resting on the table.

One is a blue Kleenex tissue box.

Another is empty, also an Amazon delivery.

I look outside and deem waiting the way.

Traffic is passing, both up and down

the valley road, the A595.

The moment could somehow

be further clenched, I imagine.

I do not wish to take things

to the nth degree as usual,

but that’s for the bats of opacity.

The cherry blossom is in bloom out the back -

I imagine if it were a sound

it could be a kind of tintinnabulation.

Tintinnabulation can be shimmering,

can be silvery and blissful too.

Sometimes I lay back adrift in

canorous chimes and don’t write anything.

It’s like the new style is proleptic, then.

It’s like it is about co-imagination.

But that’s that and this is this.

I am not A. I. as a pronominal act

of Romantic, first person lyricism.

I am drifting with the E of Everything .

The magical dawn has passed and noon

and now it is bog-standard afternoon and soon

on third thoughts I will surprise the person

to whom the cardboard box belongs with it.

It could be about Random Access Memory.

It could be about you making me breakfast.

I deliver the box to its rightful owner.

Whom it would seem does not wish for me

to make him eggs and bacon now.

Nor to be in it, at least in name.

Lattice works, imbrocation, it is forming

across great distance through the net,

and through writing at computers too.

Both writing and the net close distance.

But what that’s got to do with cows I don’t know.

I still don’t think you should’ve put it the board.

Soon we’ll be going for a run in the sky;

or travel by predictive text, fountain pen,

bullet atop a telegraph pole, xylophone,

but this little freewheeling isn’t about phones.

It’s about a philosophical soundness.

It’s about this thing sticking to you.

It’s about how white a while is.

It’s about how now a lone car whooshes

past, driving faster than I would say is fast,

and another, and another, and another,

even in Eden where flies have no name.

It’s about being fluent in newness

when even tense can lie in suspense.

It’s about seeing with the eye of the eagle.

It’s about it being too evil to say

or not say either way, this transient day.

EIGHT PRECEPTS CONVEYED IN ORDINARY SPEECH BY ‘BLUE’

My dad was a failed writer himself. Like Rimbaud he stopped writing and took up smuggling, art smuggling in his case. Before he died he managed to do away with all his writing except for conveying Eight Precepts in ordinary speech to help me with my own writing.

1. All writing is fiction.

2. It is rude to write of the living.

3. A standard of truthfulness should come before the need to the sell a story.

4. A writer has a right to a name otherwise an Exclusion of the Individual Machine can close ranks against you.

5. “Why not?” is not a good reason for writing a poem.

6. You’re supposed to get the ball over the other guy’s head.

7. The poet is a translator of feelings and the feelings you get on illegal drugs are all fake.

8. Literature either has moral compass or sheer cleverness alone.

I like them all apart from the moral compass one, because it could be seen as being a bit reductive and old-fashioned. One of dad’s examples of “sheer cleverness alone” was William Burroughs because of the cut-up method, but Burroughs was found on Ted Hughes’s bookshelf and Hughes would definitely appear a writer of moral compass to me. So things are not so black and white.

PHILOSOPHY CHAT BARN 2000

“A Russian has a right to a square of red perceived by someone from another land and Liberty and Trade go hand in hand. Smell is the most primal sense, in love, absent in cinema. Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet. Better and worse are but materialistic, Western concepts. The Age of Communication momentarily endorses, means the Age of Alienation. Each age is unable to see its own prejudices, its own cage of retrospective categorisation. The Age of Enchantment is an echo of The Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is the simultaneous astrological and sociological de-centering of Man. The opposite of something is the pre-requisite. The pre-verbal, the thought-pattern, into words, via the mechanics of meaning, is dilution. The condition of knowledge produces no Triumph. When you renounce the quest for meaning, you find it, fall back on meaning-by-proxy. When you lose your concentration you die. Your ordinary speech is surreal enough. There are too many words in the world. Everything living shares the same heartbeat in a given lifespan. The artist is the missing link reintegrating into a society of worms below and the artistic spirit androgynous. You should not trust systems for they rule with fear not love. All guns should be flown in a spaceship into the heart of the sun. Without difference no contradistinction. Everyone is my brother and I love them. The symbol [R] represents the stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse gulf, that the creative spark is not all mappable/ predictable in advance. There is no more mapless space. Fear is an epiphany of Hell in the self. Philosophy is a self-contained language corresponding to nothing real in life. Existentialism is a child at the pick and mix with a credit card. Politics is a choice between two plates of dogshit. It is better to have a cup of tea than it is to kill yourself. Portability is the new apotheosis of Form. I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too. All things must be returned to earth, surrendered like a rented thing to death.”

WHY DO I FEEL SO COLD?

Why do I feel so cold? It’s a sunny day;

I have ample clothing on (including

my new black fleece). I am drinking

hot, artificially sweetened tea. I cannot

explain it. Some dawns are colder

than the dark night of the soul where

you stay up all night writing; but

now it is not a dawn. At bottom

I do not know the answer to the question.

I might need to get in the shower,

to warm up, or even go back to bed.

It’s like I have seen a ghost, or

felt the presence of one; and now as if

on cue, the fridge changes gear, its drone,

like the ghost in the machine is here

and listening in to what I think.

The pallor of my face, is another thing.

The grey-flecked beard another too.

To write still seems the answer. Off

the top of my head though I can’t say why.

About my current situation: it is far

from a sex, drugs and rock n roll lifestyle.

But I have another side: was co-editor

of the school magazine (although

we edited nothing out.) I tap in words;

out in the garden there are many shadows.

A code is a bit like a dream sequence.

None of this explains how cold I am.

Maybe I write to warm myself up now?

Where I am, I am near the Brown Cow -

a pub we frequent for puddings – and

there, there is often a nice, warm fire.

Only for the first Vape Pen I’ve owned,

(which is black), I move to the plug

socket in the wall and get my little fix.

The button you depress lights up blue.

You insufflate the watery vapour and

exhale it along with your preconceptions.

It’s not dogmatic or automatic but is addictive.

Still it shows I have cut a bad habit.

The gravitas of mood droops down now,

prey to some casual katabasis. I still

feel this chill. It could be fear, fear

of myself and what I am capable of.

Is it death that we most fear or change?

Change I would say we all desire and

fear at the same time; change I’d suggest

is the only constant. Apart from lightspeed -

and maybe a few other things in physics.

None of this explains my frosty feeling.

It’s supposed to be spring, the singing

of songs, the unfurling of butterflies,

the lengthening of days, the crayonic

rays, the snowdrops giving way to daffs…

maybe it’s because I am sitting down?

At bottom the fell outside is very old.

It was shaped by glaciation in a different age.

Driving up the valley, there are still

craters in the contours of its steep gradient

from when melting ice shifted the rock.

It doesn’t explain how cold I am. I try

not to shock anymore unless it is to shock

with truth, but again, no explanation. Maybe

I am sensing a disturbance in the Force.

KITCHEN A

I hear another random access bat-form.

It could be that the “tron”

is a point of intersection between

technology and art, or a post-poetic

experiment with a psychotechnological edge, and

I say that w/r/t the album by The Flood,

recorded on binaural earphones…

back then I flew the nest,

knew a few moves, people,

had a co-imaginative bubble with Paul -

but now I am tired with it.

A parsimonious palimpsest of pentimento

would only open several times,

on layers of curt, cut code

and blow the bubble, insist

what to put in and when and where

at every crossroads in my art.

At least the breath of the weather

in the kitchen chimney is mine,

as I sit here with my Vape by my side.

Yes, I am tired with that fad,

that phase of my output now.

I am not the only one who has known

how a switch or fuse can be blown

and how waves can be flown,

how a switch can be thrown,

but I did say I’d plug my senses in the mains,

and contact outer space too.

It is to the moment here and now I should

surrender not like a rented thing to death

but maybe more like snow

that drops to a petticoat earth, burning -

not the living room back then

but to the present kitchen of fiction -

where I can impart than I hear

the snap, crackle and pop

of twigs being prepared

for the fire, unless it is

the fire itself crackling.

It dances with a hundred myriad tongues

of flame, entrances, flirts with

flowery shirts, makes us

feel the same, for in the

end we are that, albeit for now

alone in holy solipsism each, if united

and at one, atoned by that fact.

Fire, fire, O Wall of Maya,

what lies beyond this fragile veil?

Is there a key to the jail?

Will it be posted in the mail?

I sit and eat, a seat is a seat,

and hear the bat-forms

and think on my feet.

Could it be that we renew the Beats?

Ah, it is late, and I think of old

friends now and it makes me

want to cry. Old friends

in my heart would you even

recognise me? I doubt I shall

ever hear from so many of them again.

Outside the blue recycling bin is for paper,

the red for everything else -

so they would go in the red one.

In here, the washing up is not done.

There could be crocodiles

under those soapy bubbles.

Naturally an Andrex loo roll packet

sits like product placement, new,

on the table, where I make a fable.

Old friends come back!

Don’t give me a heart attack!

Bold love gone sadly wrong

often transmogrifies into song….

So many things were unresolved,

so many shows where no-one

goes and so many boasts and toasts

to health and talks about wealth

were left out and now where are we?

We are dealing with whatever is new.

That means were are switched on.

THERE YOU GO

Moving up to the Lakes from London, I encrypted a scientific node to do with Gravity, wrote of the net and cloud before their invention, attempted the maths for the new colour as a cellular mark and separated the pollen from its name – in my seven year old book – made some Naturalistic Observations I didn’t quite understand, including something the Irish keep hidden, another a kind of plastic spreadsheet called “Grand-darth’s ship” at the dawn of the net, developed a slight tincture meaning I was incrementally marked by that experiment into the maths for the new colour, cried but still wrote The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob, falsified the Nirvana barcode at a screen, and hasn’t even left Prep School, formed Oedipus Wrecks, attained the face of stars with some friends, formed Secret Chord H, started a poetry magazine while still at school, predicted the hunt for the God Particle from looking at dust in a late ray of light angling in before the machine was built at CERN, forewarned my brothers of September 11th in 2000, prophesied the Plough alignment but got the address well wrong, saying “maybe in India” as opposed to my own back garden at home, set aside an ideal for a book to write about it all that would later turn out to be my University tutor’s unpublished scientific paper, wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation, left school, recorded an album on binaural earphones in a Cambridge band called The Flood, had other experiments, other bits of gear like an effervescent mobile reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang, had an experiment into healing and fusing a cassette tape with a pause where stuck together in the reel, was amenable, even, to the ideal of someone else – maybe a Natural Biologist - tattooing the name of the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, wrote much about the new A. I. Revolution before it happened, then got a First Class Honours degree despite the onset of mental illness by then, hosted the Plough alignment from my back yard, attested to real skywriting at the Secret Garden Party, attested to the pint glass exploding from thin air in the capital and much more, worked at a numinous, purple-bleeding PC screen in an experiment into A. I, built the Tower of magical books like one that started to smell of perfume and others whose first appearances were deceptive, recorded further music, and when my dad died discovered the sheet where pictures grew, gave it away to my brother, who designed it after all, attained visual radio, carried on writing and writing, believing a poem could be a machine for remembering, but if it injures another I would try and stop.

JOHN ISN’T HAPPY

John isn’t happy, not Big Mac and smiles,

not new pair of trainers, not

head in the club toilet, not

free ecstasy pill at a party,

not holding Flora in my arms.

John rather wishes he was dancing

with aliens in collective ecstasy.

John doesn’t feel like he has attained

Secret Chord H, proved music

from a black hole, discovered

the forbidden fifth brain wave angel category.

John loves his family, his freedom,

his felicitous work, but feels

he is back in a blue mood?

John looks out the window,

sees a truck crawl up the hill.

John is skint, single, unemployed,

mentally ill, carless, medicated,

which reminds him to take them,

and living with his mother and brother.

John may well miss his father.

John explores a spontaneously self-

organised spreadsheet of emotion.

John dreams of a psycho-sensitive

laptop on the table before him.

John’s mood is made stable

on a sterilised table, John vents

his spleen at a slinky screen.

John renews the Blue of his

father’s art smuggling nick-

name in his own mood.

John shows us blue like Picasso.

John spots every inch of blue

outside those windows at dawn.

John remembers someone saying

the intelligent believe intelligence is sadness.

John remembers reading

the same in Bukowski.

John has a quick read of the kitchen

but finds no timeless ideas

transmitted across time -

maybe that time does not

elapse, only evaporate?

John – sitting here, no morning beer,

never getting contacted by any

of his old mates anymore - is poor -

but that isn’t it – nor can he say what is.

John’s serotonin is depleted.

John’s body is fatter, his

beard more grey-flecked than ever.

John – lighting up a new sentence -

trying to physiologically self-heal

through the use of poesis - trying

to heal the soul of the world too,

hears blue, demented, wailing sirens

where there are none, like lamentation.

John deems it war in the world.

John had chances to marry but didn’t.

John isn’t exactly feeling

stream of continuous

artificially sweetened teas

and yet in writing there

can be redemption yet -

there can be salvation.

John loves to think

a poem has a pulse.

John but who else could it have been

knows because he was there

that once upon a time

he fell and broke

a tooth on the stair.

John is flowing now.

John absolves the unholy cow.

John is getting only a little bit tired of this game,

this repetition of his own name,

and sinks back down, like

he were still on E in the undertown.

John would like to say before

we close the door on another text,

it was love, and co-imagination,

that word he coined himself,

that left it the way it was.

John cites the intellectual property

of familial love, for the way it is.

John says beyond the style

that is proleptic, you have

co-imagination, then beyond that

love is the author, then beyond that

his black friend Joy doesn’t

wish to read only dance,

have sex, have fun, take E,

then fifthly you have the omnijective plane.

John quotes the air.

John feels the chainsaw

of every passing car.

John elongates his shadow.

John stares out the window.

John is just a very sensitive

and some even say intelligent guy

that dreams of the notes of the rainbow.

John wants but what he doesn’t know,

so throws a switch on the tense

until it turns into new fonts.

John is going with the flow.

John is doing one brick from

his father’s pile of unused

bricks in the garden or else -

detuning that slightly on a dial -

John is doing the cricking of his neck.

John love’s Blake’s open keys,

loves to dream with open eyes.

John, he loves soft, sweet lullabies.

John still deems it time

to get another cup of tea.

If only he could

wrench himself

away from the swaying

abeyance of the sea.

John should still be dancing

with aliens in collective ecstasy.

A LOAD

The downstairs toilet’s flush is a scowl.

Water’s boiling point is when it starts

to breakdance involuntarily to the tune.

Artificially sweetened tea can be left as a

suicide note, where before was the alphabet.

My blue dressing gown is hanging, hanging

from the door of the attic bedroom. My

Vape pen is Portable as my aesthetic ideal.

My sum of all difference connected is yours.

It depends what you do with it even if life

turns and spits at you, or breaks your heart.

Even if you are dealt a very bad hand.

Sometimes on E it makes you feel like

your mouth is full of cold, stunning,

heavenly, crystal water and when

you speak it all spills on the floor.

Those were the days but that was then

and this is Now and Here and Real and feeling.

The poet is a translator of feelings and

the feelings you get on illegal drugs are all fake.

The look of everything says “farewell.”

The phet is best wet but makes you machinist.

The sea is a rhythmical engine that grinds.

The milk is left out so I put it in the fridge.

POEM

The sound of the chainsaw stops and starts,

more continuously and then more continuously absent

than the beating of hearts in whom

all love is stored. Treasured. Known.

Round and round goes the ragged, toothy blade.

An everglade could be the opposite. Stop.

I am not calibrating a scale. A spectrum.

My perfect date: it’s not something I ever

got a chance to think about. My best guess

would be pizza. Or pasta. No longer

suffering heart-valve mutation at the

graves of intelligence, no longer a vegetable

of dusky dawn. No longer would drugs

be involved. I can’t remember going

on a single one. But then again I can. One

time. I took a lady to a restaurant. But

that was then and this is now, this quiet lull

between chainsaws – before it starts again.

I suppose sucking on the same spaghetti

with a woman with whom I shared an embrace

in a doomful, boarding school corridor,

that half rhymes with the waves of Florida.

Art gets to its feet like a cartoon Bambi.

Love can go veggie for reasons of Disney.

These statements, are hardly timeless ideas

transmitted across Time but together form

an over-arching, olfactory rhyme. She

would be a drizzled, Cola-bottle woman

who word-walks my way into my arms.

Then I’d play the renegade, or maybe I would.

Stop. The chainsaw has ceased its sound.

It has stopped lamenting, and many pieces

of newly chopped wood lie out there on

the ground. Sweet chirruping birdsong

can be heard like laser flute in the background.

I dream of no date right now, but feel late.

My Fate always seems to be to wait for Kate.

The pause for quiet reflection can also be

heard between passing cars, as if between

stars. My humility is a small white pebble.

My University degree is a triumph of assiduous

effort. My song is the song of Freedom,

whom it seems is Man’s main, psychic

thread dating back to his nomadic days,

when he was tall, lithe and muscular, and

even beyond to Gondwanaland. In danger of

drinking too much tea I seek a way out of

normalcy, the run-of-the-mill mediocrity

of it all. I am tall; and while the chainsaw

blade went round and round, my anti-psychotic

injection which they call the depot, O,

stretching honesty like chewing gum, came,

by car, to my home, where I play no game,

but to see things through and be nice, have

no nastiness inside me. No breakdancing

doodle dice are thrown. I download the

lowdown of downtime. I make up my mind.

The war is insane, but with mead you can

lie around on a sunny, green bank at the

Secret Garden Party and drink, and later

when you take your last E, and it has no effect,

real skywriting might course across the Night.

Scattershot-logical in connections I conduct

an invisible lightning bolt, no, an invisible

orchestra behind the scene. There is music

hidden in the N plus 7 shuttlecock. “O where

are you now?” Syd Barrett sang, and I know

he encrypted a line about a butterfly which

I have forgotten. It must’ve gone off, pursuing

the redolent fume of the mating queen herself.

If only to de-stigmatise mental illness was my

game. A game is a rehearsal for death, even

cards. They will sail away to sea and deem it

that a bumblebee also has a Heaven, crossing

the ocean of green. Faded, E comedown T-

shirts from 2001 are better than, say, monopolising

indigenous wisdom, anyway. So here is me,

chatting facets and assets and having none.

It could take voices to end this one. The weather

is not so bad today, if a little cement mixer

grey and I love my friends and family, and

drink way too much tea, eager to retain an edge

that means not giving the game away, having

little to say, not wishing to repeat publish

anything, but to sing, a musician after all.

You should hear my songs, and so should Paul.

The chainsaw will be back in the shed, no

tears spilled over her gargantuan season cycle.

It is not the season of Optimus Prime, where

leaves fall, but renewal of green, rebirth of flowers,

love, hope, song and more. So if I could suck

the same pasta as someone else, it would be

her, but I can’t so I am stumped. Dumped.

Jumpstarting the heart can be a bit stop and start.

If my credit runs out give me a shout, let me hear.

There might be a beer in the fridge. That may be

where to end, where this tends, tired, tried,

tested, tedious, trespassing, ticklish and tasting

the poem on tick thing while the clock ticks.

Even the voices would’ve got another tea.

There are only three beers in the fridge

and they are all for me if I choose to lose

my blues and maybe vanity that way, though

I cannot say if I will, and hope to not spill,

but speak in strong, sure tones of elephant

bones that connect like mobile phones

when the Night is a wonder. Right now

it is still light and the days are getting

longer and longer, and approaching summer,

I feel my case is getting stronger. I would deem it

that I have gleaned enough for a new publication

even if the Plough is a purple cow, and the train

station a home for crows. I don’t suppose

they blow their nose. As you can see I am pinned

to the literal spot by an anti-psychotic injection

and invest my downtime with charming inflection,

canorous chimes, mellifluous phraseturning,

learning the art of standing on my own two feet.

To be discrete would be up my street, not

dictate, and so I wait. There is a yew tree,

traditional Christian symbol, guarding

the gate. Its roots go down into slow

centuries gone looking for water, water,

clairvoyant daughter, please show us all

your ragged silken eye. I still, still, like Gulliver’s

Travels, and Goodbye Ruby Tuesday. Goodbye.

THE BROKEN TOME

The introduction says there are 2 parts.

That it juxtaposes songs and freeverse.

So we read the songs – it includes

the lyrics of the new solo acoustic album.

Then we read the poetry – he has

something to say that’s the building

block of a happier world.

Then we’re into part 3.

Part 3 seems like he has been cued

to monopolise indigenous wisdom

in regimented metres without knowing

who the voices that instruct him even are.

Then we’re into a scientific paper.

The topics are very wide ranging.

It’s supposed to be ordered by the wind.

It’s about mathematics as well.

It’s also about mental illness.

Then there’s a fifth part.

It’s the rock songs, only the recorded ones -

so the new solo acoustic album

is repeated, and the others

have been published before.

Finally we have his Bonus Track -

the falsification of the Nirvana barcode in music.

This whole last section of recorded

songs is supposed to be defaced bank notes.

Don’t forget much of it has been

published before and don’t forget

you’re not supposed to do that

and don’t forget by the time we get to

the equations in the scientific paper

we have read them all already, previously,

in the second part, those poems.

It shouldn’t be like that.

Nor should it be that fixing

it means getting weaponised or bombarded

by messages through the screen while listening

to ten voices per minute, some

of whom are people, others symptoms,

while real bodies walk in and out

of the kitchen, without being able

to say anything that doesn’t seem

a prompt or clue as to what to do.

In the end we are not sure what to do.

There is something about the terror of the age

that is captured in the broken thing.

Still, the author deems it a write-off.

He has dreams of releasing

the melatonin in the soil into

the brain of the reader, for instance.

He can’t, surely, leave it like that.

He vacillates between yes and no.

He sends off draft after draft after draft.

He wants it to be a bit more slender and elegant.

He likes to think on his feet but

doesn’t want to just give us piss.

You shouldn’t repeat publish things.

Things don’t need to be this bad.

What it seemed to be about was having

to stop because he’d become too mental.

In which case we could spot the flaw

and the genius in the same thing.

To not go below the belt is wise.

The style he pertains to, then, when

he tries to fix it, to make it less mad,

is the one we use all the time - even

when we speak of putting on wellies.

Any old mediocre diction would do.

The publishers must be going crazy.

They like it when everything is destroyed.

He feels it arraigns and inveighs against

his Craving for Order in a negative way.

He does not wish to hide the madness,

just to produce something nice.

A statue of excrement is not the answer.

Nor is writing of another in the shower.

There has to be a better way than breakage.

He does not know much in the end.

He couldn’t even tell you if

September 11th was an attack

on Jim Morrison’s poetry or not.

He concedes that without the broken tome

his best work was his seven year old Prep.

He flies when he writes even if it is

punctilious, staccato, paratactic, pedantic too.

To be gay or not to be gay is a question

he deals with sometimes but changes his mind.

Why they might be after him he

does not know still, though

he suspects the people wish

to pin many things on a bum.

He would deem it that but it

would be but a bat with a fad.

If he made up his mind there would be dissent

in every word that was uttered.

That would include real people,

ten voices a minute, and

the messages he receives too.

Given the inchoate morass of his 1000 files,

acres of virtual Brainforest, the teeming

data-tree, some of the psychiatric

team wish for him to stop, but

already he has paid for a book

which already he has changed his mind about

nearly a dozen times on the first day,

and they say it has to wait weeks.

Sometimes he feels like just being

a musician but then again

the lyrics to that new, solo

acoustic album are un-published,

and he has paid, after a sleepless night,

for more of what destroys his health.

O is the key of the babbling unicorn.

The books arrive in a box and sit there

and nobody ever reads a single page.

Still he presses on with his building

blocks of a happier world, which

is a sound ideology to have.

He borrowed a bike so to speak.

He only had it for a week.

He had help from voices,

people and the watchers

when he organised his sluice.

When he finds the right word, and it is

an uncommon one, he feels justified,

as if it represented linguistic energy,

defamiliarisation of perception.

Gnarled treefingers snap so easily.

It’s either the carcrash in the library

or crying in your brother’s arms.

In terms of the first one, it can be saved.

You can let go of the wheel.

In terms of the second it is the saving,

but that one with the do all, see all,

be all, could be the tears.

THE END OF THE WEND

I was wrong when in a poem I said

“her breath a poisonous magic.”

Now I need someone to give me medication.

Shall I get it out for you, love?

Systems are not to be trusted

for they rule with fear not love.

Simon says Chaucer is better than

Dante because Dante is about systems

and Chaucer about something real.

Having not read them yet I don’t know.

So I can’t quite comment on that.

I read in Breaking Open The Head

meanwhile that the division of people

into those that like mushrooms

and those that don’t is the most

central and ancient in civilisation.

My father said Breaking Open

The Head was my generation’s

Doors of Perception, Heaven and

Hell. A healing magic mushroom

trip can be a secret garden, allowing

the walls of the cheap Hotel to breathe,

a piece of fluff on the ceiling to walk.

LIGHT SABRE HANDLE

The big, silver, pasta pot is on the hob, heating

water to clean it with steam from within.

While I have never laid down in the beck,

I have imagined having a light sabre still -

have imagined the notebook, portable and

analogue as a light sabre handle. Today

it is raining so we cannot hang the washing

out to dry. O, my light sabre, Nirvana-blue!

Through whom I can see things inside out!

It reminds me of when I decided to ‘have a goyt’ -

plasmatoidal, olfactory, gustatory, sonic, tactile

and long. By now the water in the pot is boiling,

but I am to leave for ten minutes, until it

is sterile, and can leave it longer if I want.

We need the big, silver pot for pasta. We

eat a lot of pasta and the pot is just right.

It was expensive, you know, so we don’t

want to throw it away just because it got

smelly with some left-alone stew that rotted -

we wish to wash the pot. It boils on, does

the water, through whom I can see clearly.

Often it does not matter what we research

as long as it leads to lucidity. Often we find

eyes are meant for crying as Derrida says,

and a tear is a contraption too. I see the steam

rising from the big, silver pot now. It is

like an upside down haircut. I can leave it,

as long as is possible, to wash it, to sterilise it.

Apparently it takes ten minutes, but I can

leave it for longer and the longer the better,

too, like having sex with a radiant angel.

So I sit, waiting for my cue to stop, writing

while the water boils in the pot, washing

its insides, ready for when the visitors

get here from Italy. I can go on and on

and like the pot’s boiling of the water,

possibly the longer the better, which as I

say would like making love to a radiant

angel in a dream-meet scenario. Elongating

this precious moment, I hear the rattling

of the lid of the pot as the steam comes out,

from time to time, when the pressure builds

and knocks it a little bit off its perch. Soon

the water in the pot will run out and then

I will have to stop writing and do something

about it. I will have to refill the pot with water,

and now it rattles again, the lid, and now

I choose with my blues and my ideal of

the Excellent News to go over and see

what the state of affairs is like over there.

There is only a little bit of water left.

IN A BRAVE NEW TENSE

If I could invent a pen-knife with any tools, Dr. Calculator Ptom’s word chord piano would be one, also a drug called Strictly Free that pertains to self-evidence. A virtual death machine would be another, also a red-bleeding type-writer inside a ping-pong ball. Maybe I’d trespass into the world of unseemly language and say an holographic horsecock protruding through the bedroom wall would also be possible. An invisible square of air called ‘Mosaic by Darth Vader’ stroked on telly could be another like an eco-poetic post-poem. I’d also like to invent a neutraliser drink that sobers you, totally, in an instant. At least I did when I dreamed up this pen-knife in the year 2000. Further mad, Icelandic inventions would include the Nirvana button or pill, the Doors computer game, the psycho-sensitive fire alarm, a computer that speaks to you in the style of Rimbaud (translated by Mathieu), a gaseous camera and most recently an hyperlink to Heaven! What’s wrong with these is that they are not real. It is better to relate than invent in art. Art is above politics. We should live in the here and now and real also as a Buddhist would say. My dad would tell me this, and tell me sci-fi is secondary to the human condition. He would tell me the more weird aliens you get in a film the worse it is. I think when you record on binaural earphones (like we did in The Flood) and say you’re going to plug your senses in the mains, those senses become aliens, like the aliens in Hollywood films, like The Fifth Element where there is a blue alien that can sing in two notes at once. As mad as I am I don’t actually think reality is a computer program designed by aliens in the 1980’s; nor do I think caves used to be alien cinemas. And by the way I heard recently back in 2000 before The Flood even formed it was even my idea to invent the earphones! Imagine then how forgetful I was when it all happened! When we recorded on them! Water still sought Rock Bottom!

A FIND

It is time to come clean as it were -

I was walking along the beach

with my metal detector

in the year 2094, noting

the shoreline as an art exhibition,

when I heard a BLEEEEEEP,

and started to dig, and found

a metal box, and exhumed it

and opened it, and looked inside….

There was a wad of paper!

It wasn’t quite currency

but enough to qualify as a find -

it was like the ash of yesterday’s

fire wrapped up in yesterday’s newspaper

and put out in the right green bin.

The document I took home

and read – a testament, it was,

to our times or rather to their

times long ago. So that was how

I came across the document

which struck me sometimes

as finding lines of shining conveyance.

Almost like a strange, unseen

vernacular arrowed down from

some lost, mad Godhead within,

it took me only so long to read,

and I found it scintillating. I

thought I should fork out my own

benefits money to have it published.

Then we could see what they

were up to in the year 2024

and more and many more

and this we know, there is

no ‘we’, I am the third person

immaculate, free, so light sabre

down, Shell petrol station

close, open the beautiful, sleepless omen

moon, whom it seems shines

like an electric coin and seems

to be in love with the sea

and scatters her jewellery

box all around, and find

the reek of small, burnt flowers

from Finland and smell them.

They seem redolent of the fume

of the mating queen enough to me,

whom it seems gets seasick

when we go to sea, and waits

without longing, as if for nothing,

now that our time has arrived,

and computers control the sun,

and a new age has soon begun,

and the laptop is psycho-sensitive now,

and there is even a virtual death machine,

but my mother is still old-fashioned

and listens to Nirvana Nevermind,

on vinyl, which I hear is coming back.

SHEEP

The free-thinking sheep eat grass in the Combe field,

the field we rent out to a local farmer friend,

who moves them a lot, with his dog Max.

The free thinking sheep eat grass in the field;

and once I remember when my dad was chainsawing

some wood by the fence nearest to the house,

a black one among them, not given to Dogma,

Stupor, Torpor and Slumber, left the flock

to be nearer the chainsaw, crossing the field

on his own, like a recalcitrant sheep, a renegade

sheep, a Republican sheep, even an atheist sheep.

The chainsaw was screaming about the law.

The black sheep stood and listened and said “what?”

He wasn’t going to be made into a sheepskin rug,

surrendered to the Feelies from Brave New World.

He was a free-thinking sheep, and glad at that.

He said “I’m terribly sorry but a black cloud

has been hanging over this field for too long.

Would you mind giving my ears a rest now?”

And just like that the chainsaw stopped lamenting.

OOOPSAMADAISICAL

The effect of a Mario mushroom unfurls.

There are 4D soundwaves in the air.

Why have I got clothes on too?

It’s like the end of The Great Gatsby -

whom it seems is an infradiegetic heterotopia, pertaining

to panoramic, panchronic overview

like a chronotope turned euchronia -

unless all this represents a word-world

gone polysemic with the multifarious

possibilities of hermeneutic autonomy

through whom the esemplastic might and

only might have fled away the quadlibetical…

and the light that falls is an elf -

and the golden faun is on the lawn -

and DA is the oldest of all word-forms

of Indo-European etymological origin.

Now the unicorn meets the golden sea,

and deems that the end is the beginning;

and now the fire in our hearts burns on;

and the far-fetched fading stars will

awake tonight to notice love again.

So my mother is happy at last.

So then we can bring it back.

So then through the foam we see -

“water” is the word least changed

out of all words since the dawn of Man.

I plundered this paradise from nothingness,

whose void is decorated with butterflies

brighter than flying worms, and

more real than floral wallpaper.

Into the filament of bird I travel, even

if only to drag it back to innocent science.

Let love dissolve all your robots.

Let love – well, be your feeling.

Let feeling come before thought.

Let love come before hate.

Let lists not be scrambled.

Let there be only so many hours in a day.

Let it all go on in the happy world of Haribo.

When you give up on Starbucks

cool, new shit can happen.

I might build a new castle between

the letters of the word OK

but that would be a bit old.

O heaving breast, where I walk, rambling

on the bramble road at the rosy crucifix!

May we say hello to strangers

when we pass them, walking.